The present invention generally relates to a monitoring system and more particularly to a laser and environmental monitoring system.
Conventionally, laser desorption mass spectrometry has been used with a fixed laser beam pulse shape and computers for simple chemical analysis processes on purified molecules. The laser beam pulse shape was not considered an important parameter and was not modified; whatever fixed shape was set by the manufacturer for the ultraviolet laser was used in the tests. The general concept of typically laser selective ion formation from molecules in a molecular beam is disclosed in the following publication: Assion et al., “Control of Chemical Reactions by Feedback-Optimized Phase-Shaped Femtosecond Laser Pulses,” Science, Vol. 282, page 919 (Oct. 30, 1998). The pulse shaping process with a learning algorithm is disclosed in Judson et al., “Teaching Lasers to Control Molecules,” Physical Review Letters, Vol. 68, No. 10, page 1500 (Mar. 9, 1992). It is noteworthy, however, that the Assion article discloses use of an 80 femtosecond laser pulse and requires molecules to be isolated in a molecular beam, while the Judson article discloses use of a one nanosecond laser pulse and is purely conceptual as it does not include experimental results.
Commercially practical femtosecond lasers have been unavailable until recently. For example, lasers which can generate 10 femtosecond or less laser pulse durations have traditionally been extremely expensive, required unrealistically high electrical energy consumption (for extensive cooling, by way of example) and depended on laser dyes that had to be replenished every month thereby leading to commercial impracticality.
Ultrashort pulses are prone to suffer phase distortions as they propagate through or reflect from optics because of their broad bandwidth. There has been significant progress in correcting these unwanted phase distortions. There have been recent experimental attempts to purposely shape the phase of ultrashort pulses since shaped pulses have been shown to increase the yield of certain chemical reactions and multiphoton excitation, although the mechanism for the observed changes remains unknown in most cases. As usually practiced, the output waveform is determined by the Fourier transform (FT) of a spatial pattern transferred by a mask or a modulator array onto the dispersed optical spectrum. The introduction of liquid crystal modulator arrays and acousto-optic (A/O) modulators into FT pulse shapers led to computer programmable pulse shaping, with millisecond and microsecond reprogramming times, respectively, and widespread adoption of this technique. These shaped pulses require a very large data set and in many cases, complex learning calculations for determining the pulse shaping characteristics for a particular application. The optimal pulse for the particular application is not known in advance. Since the variation shape of the possible pulse shapes is huge, scanning the entire parameter space is impossible and as such the optimized pulse shape could not have been predicted by theory. For a pulse shaper with N pixels, one can generate (P*A)N shaped pulses, where P and A are the number of different phases and amplitudes a pixel can take. If it is assumed 100 pixels, each taking 10 different amplitude values and 100 different phase values, the number of different pulses is of order of magnitude 10300. This dataset is extremely large, therefore, while in principle, the field exists to achieve the desired photonic transformation or excitation, finding it is a great challenge. It would be desirable for a system to control ultrashort pulses with a smaller dataset, operable to generate very complex pulse shapes that are optimal for the particular application and are highly reproducible.
Additionally, monitoring the environment for chemical and biological agents, including explosives, from terrorist threats or from industrial contamination has become a necessity for reasons of national security and the well being of humans. Conventional devices are only designed for use to detect a single known agent or are inaccurate. Accordingly, to avoid a costly false positive or false negative identification, it would be desirable to employ femtosecond laser and control technology to environmental monitoring.